Affected Disaffection: "Afterschool"

Afterschool plays like a film student’s demo reel of the various ways to signify “alienation”—shallow depth of field, over-lit sterile interiors, ambient sounds of fluorescent light hums, expressionless actors, methodical tracking shots frequently overrunning or catching up to their human subjects. Even the best filmmakers should take care in how they choose to explore new implementations for these overused techniques—Gus Van Sant’s recent Paranoid Park, for example, succeeds at most of the above nearly despite itself—but you’d think Afterschool’s 24-year-old first-time feature director Antonio Campos had just discovered them for himself by the way he embarrassingly assaults the viewers with them in order to fashion his astonishingly shallow portrait of teenage disaffection. Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Afterschool.

Afterschool plays like a film student’s demo reel of the various ways to signify “alienation”—shallow depth of field, over-lit sterile interiors, ambient sounds of fluorescent light hums, expressionless actors, methodical tracking shots frequently overrunning or catching up to their human subjects. Even the best filmmakers should take care in how they choose to explore new implementations for these overused techniques—Gus Van Sant’s recent Paranoid Park, for example, succeeds at most of the above nearly despite itself—but you’d think Afterschool’s 24-year-old first-time feature director Antonio Campos had just discovered them for himself by the way he embarrassingly assaults the viewers with them in order to fashion his astonishingly shallow portrait of teenage disaffection. Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Afterschool.